Strada Romana is the present Via Cavour, still the busiest in the city. Passing up it towards Camollia, from the Croce del Travaglio, we come to the Piazza Tolomei, in which the people assembled on the eve of Montaperti. The great grey stone Palazzo Tolomei, its portals guarded by two lions and surmounted by the armorial bearings, the three crescent moons, of that great Guelf House, was begun in 1208; it is the oldest, perhaps the most imposing of all the private palaces in Siena. The councils of the State occasionally met here in the first days of Guelf preponderance after the battle of Colle, and it was here that King Robert of Naples was entertained in 1310. In earlier times—those eventful days that preceded Montaperti—the General Council met in San Cristofano opposite. The column with the Lupa—though the present wolf only dates from the seventeenth century—was originally erected in 1260, after Montaperti, in token of this. The church itself was modernised in the eighteenth century. It contains some tombs of the Tolomei and a good picture by Girolamo del Pacchia, representing the Madonna and Child between St Luke and the Blessed Bernardo. It was in this church in 1376 that St Catherine effected a reconciliation between the Maconi, headed by Stefano and his father Corrado, and the Tolomei and Rinaldini. Behind it, round and about the Via del Re, there are a number of picturesque old houses of that epoch standing and several towers that once belonged to the Tolomei.[155]
On the left, next to the Gothic Palazzo Tolomei, is a graceful little palace in the style of the fifteenth century, decorated above with the Lily of Florence. Further on, on the right, is the Palazzo Bichi, rebuilt in 1520 for the unfortunate Alessandro. At the corner of the Piazza Salimbeni is the Palazzo Spannocchi, begun in 1473 for Messer Ambrogio Spannocchi, the treasurer of Pius II. It is a perfect type of the massive, yet graceful domestic architecture of the Florentine Quattrocento. Formerly ascribed to Bernardino Rossellino, Signor Lisini has recently discovered reason for believing that it (as well as the palace in the Via Romana of the Abbot of San Galgano) was built under the direction of Giuliano da Maiano.[156]
The vast Gothic Palazzo Salimbeni, a compromise between a castle and a palace, was mainly constructed in the thirteenth, but modernised in the nineteenth century. The back of it should be surveyed from the Piazza dell’ Abbadia, where it is frequently mistaken by tourists and other casual persons (including one English writer of repute!) for a Gothic abbey; the name of the piazza really refers to San Donato, which was formerly an abbey and the family church of the Salimbeni, as San Cristofano was that of their rivals, the Tolomei. The great Ghibelline family that played so turbulent a part in the early history of Siena gradually died out; “to-day,” wrote Bargagli, in the latter part of the Cinquecento, “it is utterly extinguished; besides their arms and their palaces, nought else remains of them save the name.” We may take their palace as the background for two of the best and most beautiful love stories of old Siena. In one, Anselmo di Messer Salimbene Salimbeni, one of the richest young nobles of the city, is secretly enamoured of Angelica Montanini, whose brother Carlo is the last of a noble but now ruined house, between which and the Salimbeni there is a deadly feud. Thrown into prison on a trumped-up charge of plotting against the popular regime, a price is set upon Carlo’s life; he refuses to pay, lest his sister should be reduced to beggary, and is about to perish on the scaffold when Anselmo steps in and pays the fine to excess. The expedient by which Carlo and Angelica attempt to repay their debt to Anselmo is somewhat repugnant to our modern code of ethics or conventions—it appears again in the underplot of Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness—but it ends in the marriage of Anselmo and Angelica in San Donato to the great delight of all the city. In the other story, Ippolito Saracini has fallen passionately in love with Cangenova, the youngest of the three orphan daughters of Messer Reame Salimbeni, and his love is returned. But the mother, anxious first to marry her other daughters, will not suffer his addresses, and keeps Cangenova in strict seclusion. Pretending to leave Siena as a pilgrim to St James of Compostella, Ippolito lurks in a little house near San Lorenzo, which is next door to the garden in which the lady and her daughters walk. He watches Cangenova at sunrise, watering her lilies and violets in the balcony or playing with the little goldfinch that has its nest in the mulberry tree outside her window. Then one night he takes advantage of her mother’s absence to climb the tree, and draws her to the window by frightening her goldfinch. A sudden fright brings their meeting to a premature end, and presently she is dying. Disguised as a pilgrim, Ippolito visits her on her death-bed, and they interchange professions of unalterable love; he joins her funeral procession as a member of one of the confraternities, carrying a torch, and falls dead in San Francesco when the tomb is closed.[157]
In the Via delle Belle Arti, next to the picture gallery which has already been described, is the Biblioteca Comunale, once the meeting-place of the most famous of the Sienese academies—the Intronati. Among its treasures are two of the original letters sent by St Catherine from Rome to Stefano Maconi; they are not, however, in her own handwriting but appear, from internal evidence, to have been dictated by her to Barduccio Canigiani.